It’s official, folks: Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for existing Windows users—as long as you claim it quickly.

Kicking off the consumer-focused Windows 10 event in Redmond on Tuesday, January 21, Microsoft operating system chief Terry Myerson announced that current users of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 will be able to upgrade to the new operating system for free as long as they do so within one year of Windows 10's launch—even if your version of Windows is pirated. Once you’ve claimed the upgrade, it's permanent, and Microsoft will keep you updated for the supported lifetime of the device.

If you have a Nokia Lumia smartphone, your chances of running the Windows 10 Preview are looking up: According to Microsoft’s Gabe Aul, the company is set to open up Windows 10 Preview builds to a broader range of phones.

The Windows 10 Preview program opened up to smartphones back in February, but the initial preview builds worked only on a small number of Lumia devices. The reasons for this limited rollout were technical—Microsoft had to select phones with an OS partition large enough to handle Windows 10 until it had finished a partition-resizing feature known as Partition Stitching.

If you have a Nokia Lumia smartphone, your chances of running the Windows 10 Preview are looking up: According to Microsoft’s Gabe Aul, the company is set to open up Windows 10 Preview builds to a broader range of phones.

The Windows 10 Preview program opened up to smartphones back in February, but the initial preview builds worked only on a small number of Lumia devices. The reasons for this limited rollout were technical—Microsoft had to select phones with an OS partition large enough to handle Windows 10 until it had finished a partition-resizing feature known as Partition Stitching.

Open-source software projects are often well intended, but security can take a back seat to making the code work.

OpenDaylight, the multivendor software-defined networking (SDN) project, learned that the hard way last August after a critical vulnerability was found in its platform.

It took until December for the flaw, called Netdump, to get patched, a gap in time exacerbated by the fact that the project didn’t yet have a dedicated security team. After he tried and failed to get in touch with OpenDaylight, the finder of the vulnerability, Gregory Pickett, posted it on Bugtraq, a popular mailing list for security flaws.

After years of shuffling through various names for its modern app platform, Microsoft is keeping it simple with “Windows Apps.”

The name will refer to universal apps that can run across phones, tablets, PCs, Xbox, Internet of Things, and emerging devices like HoloLens. Microsoft revealed the branding during its WinHEC hardware conference last week, Paul Thurrott reports.

As for traditional desktop software, also known as Win32 programs, Microsoft will officially refer to them as “Windows desktop applications,” so "Windows apps" and "Windows desktop apps" will be two different beasts with awfully similar names. Microsoft says it’s fully committed to supporting desktop programs in Windows 10.

Cisco Systems released firmware updates for several routers and switches that run its IOS and IOS XE software in order to fix flaws in their autonomic networking infrastructure (ANI) feature.

ANI is an automatic device management feature that allows Cisco IOS devices to securely join a domain and be configured without prestaging—setting up the necessary accounts in advance.

Cisco’s new patches, released Wednesday, address three vulnerabilities in the way Cisco IOS and IOS XE devices handle autonomic networking (AN) messages.

One vulnerability could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to force a vulnerable device to join a rogue autonomic domain by sending it specially crafted AN messages. This would give the attacker limited control over the device and would prevent it from joining the legitimate domain, Cisco said in a security advisory.

Windows 10 devices in the future could be measuring temperature, environmental pressure and carbon dioxide levels, as Microsoft provides an interface to support a wide range of sensors.

Microsoft is building a unified sensor interface and universal driver for Windows 10 that will support a slew of environmental, biometric, proximity, health and motion sensors, the company said last week at the WinHEC trade show in Shenzhen. Microsoft is also providing the building blocks for Windows 10 to support sensors that haven’t yet been released.

With support for more sensors, Microsoft hopes to bring “new functionality” to PCs, smartphones, tablets, gadgets and electronics running Windows 10, according to a slide from a presentation.

Microsoft needs apps for Windows 10 to make it a success, but developers need tools to make them. With Microsoft’s first technical preview of Visual Studio 2015, they’ll be able to get started.

Developers who have signed up for Microsoft’s Windows Insiders program can start building so-called universal apps for PCs, tablets and smartphones and the Xbox game console using the Visual Studio 2015 preview tools for Windows 10, the company said in a blog post.

The goal is to give developers the opportunity to play around with some of Windows 10’s new capabilities while Microsoft finishes building the operating system, the company said. The capabilities include Windows 10’s adaptive user interface, which changes to accommodate screens of different sizes.

Despite still being very much an early preview, Windows 10 is already brimming with handy new featues, along with new tweaks and tricks—and, because the operating is still in preview, a handful of those tricks unlock powerful functionality hidden to everyday users.

I noticed that Windows wasn’t creating restore points as often as I wanted them. I set out to discover how I—and you—can better control how often this vital task happens without manual intervention.

Just about any new problem that makes Windows behave badly can be fixed by opening Windows’ System Restore and returning to an earlier time. But this only works if you have a restore point that was created before the unfortunate changes.

Restore points are also vital to Windows’ File History feature. If you want to go back to last Thursday’s version of that spreadsheet, you'd better hope that a restore point was created last Thursday. (You can avoid this problem with a good backup program.)

Sam McCurry wisely created an image backup of his internal drive. Now he wants to know how that backup can help him should Windows fail to boot.

An image backup copies the complete contents of your drive, including the partition table and the boot sector, to a single file—usually stored on an external drive. Other forms of backup are fine for protecting documents and photos, but only an image backup can restore your personal Windows environment.

I’ll tell you to create an image backup, and how to restore it to an unbootable drive, in both Windows 7 and 8.

GodMode. The mere mention of the omnipotence-granting tweak should bring a smile to the face of veteran Windows tinkerers, and yes, the legendary hidden feature still works in the Windows 10 Preview.

GodMode essentially unlocks a centralized table of contents for all of Windows’ far-flung features and customization options, drawing all your options together into a single interface and sorting them by tweak types. Once you’ve basked in its glory, you’ll be hooked for life.

Activating it is easy: Just create a new folder and rename it to following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Be sure to include the period after “GodMode”! And while this hack is known as GodMode far and wide, you can actually name this folder whatever you’d like by altering the “GodMode” portion of the string. Hassle-Free PC columnist Ian Paul names his Jedi Mode, as he explained in his longer look at the feature.

Glennr4466 found a flaw in my advice about booting into Windows 8 Safe Mode. Because it requires a reboot, it doesn’t work if Windows refuses to boot at all.

If Windows 8 won’t boot normally, it probably won’t boot into Safe Mode, either. You can try the trick of repeatedly pressing and releasing F8 (described in my previous article), but it seldom works with Windows 8.

So what can you do? You have to fix the problem that’s keeping your PC from booting at all. Then, once Windows 8 can boot, you can reboot it into Safe Mode (if you still need to).

Tom Shea administers a PC with several users. Some of the shortcuts on his desktop also show up on other people’s desktops. He wants to control when that happens.

Desktop sharing and privacy is actually pretty simple, but it’s not well known. Unless you know the trick, you can’t control which items will appear only on your desktop, and which will appear on everyone’s desktop.

The shortcuts and other files that show up on the desktop do so because they’re in a Desktop folder. (And yes, shortcuts are files—small files that point to other files.) But your PC has more than one Desktop folder, and therein lies the trick of creating public and private desktop shortcuts.

Windows is full of so many handy little features it's easy to forget some of them if you aren't using it every day. One such feature is Jump Lists, which is the app-specific menu that appears when you right-click a desktop app icon on the taskbar.

What you see in a Jump List is almost totally dependent on the app developer. By default, all Windows will provide is an option to open/close the app and pin/unpin it from the taskbar. Beyond that it's up to the app maker to add what makes sense for their app

Many apps, if they use Jump Lists at all, simply use the feature to show your recently opened files, along with an option to permanently pin specific files to the list. That's a great feature, but Jump Lists can be far more useful and productive than that. They can, for example, allow you to jump to a specific section of an app or open the app with a specific mode or setting. There's really no limit to what a Jump List can do.

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WindowsWindows 8 and Windows 7 Safe Modes: How to enter and when to use themThu, 04 Dec 2014 07:11:00 -0800Lincoln SpectorLincoln Spector

No reader question today. Instead, I want to discuss Safe Mode, Windows’ stripped-down, minimum-driver environment. For years now, there’s been one quick way to enter Safe Mode—pressing F8. But that trick doesn’t work for all Windows 8 PCs.

And even in older versions, it’s not always the easiest form of entry.

Safe Mode gives you a low-resolution, visually ugly, feature-limited Windows environment useful for diagnostic and repair purposes. You wouldn’t want to create a PowerPoint demonstration there, but if things are misbehaving, it can be a fruitful place to visit. For instance, if a program’s uninstall routine keeps failing, it just might uninstall properly in Safe Mode.

Windows Explorer (AKA File Explorer) offers a Navigation Bar on the left to help you select folders. Mary Hall asked how to customize it.

The Explorer Navigation Bar provides a map to the drives and folders on or accessible to your computer. Two of the sections, Favorites and Libraries, are easily configurable. The other sections are not configurable for a good reason. If you want to add a drive to the Navigation Bar, you need to add that drive from your PC (which adds it to the Navigation Bar automatically).

A quick note on the name: Microsoft has called its file manager Windows Explorer since Windows 95. With Windows 8, they renamed it File Explorer—a good change in my opinion. For this article, I’ll just call it Explorer.